Democrats finally agree: We ARE better off now than four years ago

Expect to hear variations on this theme all week: Things are better than they were four years ago, and will get better.

Republicans at their convention last week made the central question of the election whether Barack Obama has revived the overall economy and made people’s lives tangibly better than they were in 2008. They point to high unemployment, higher gas prices and a swollen national debt as reasons to oust him in favor of Mitt Romney.

Democrats are offering a counter-narrative, though, as delivered by Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak at a New York delegation breakfast:

“Before he had even taken office, his economic advisers said, ‘Mr. President, our economy is about to collapse and may bring down the world economy. The U.S. auto industry is about to collapse and literally be outsourced to China. We have two wars with no end in sight; Bin Laden is at large,’ ” Rybak said. “That’s where we were. Then: 29 straight months of private sector job growth. The U.S. auto industry was saved — Romney was wrong, Obama was right…we are out of Iraq, thank God, and if someone wants to use the word Obamacare, I’ll take it.”

He and others offered another key difference with the Republican platform: a need to invest in infrastructure. Government spending in the abstract can be negatively cast, but most people love roads and bridges. They create construction jobs and, Democrats argue, are critical components of strengthening the overall economy.

And here’s what Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse had to say about it:

“I mean, we were literally a plane that was heading — the trajectory was towards the ground when the president took over. He got the stick, he’s pulled us up out of that decline. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Lost 3.5 millions, Americans I know have not forgotten, we lost 3.5 million jobs in the last six months of the Bush administration. We gained 4.5 million jobs over the past two and a half years. So if you just put those side by side, clearly we’re better off. However, we have a long way to go.”

You’ll remember there was some initial confusion about how the Democrats would try to spin the “are you better off” subject. Check out our previous coverage: